The friends of Ollanta Humala

I wrote here about the Peruvian presidential election pitting leftist thug Ollanta Humala against Keiko Fujimori. The election was held yesterday. Fox News reports that official results, with 87 percent of the vote counted, had Humala ahead with 51.2 percent. This is very bad news for Peru, perhaps limited by the modest presence of Humala’s party in the Peruvian Congress, where it holds 47 out of 130 seats.
Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa deserves to be singled out for opprobrium. If Humala is in fact the winner of the election, as he appears to be, Vargas Llosa’s endorsement of Humala may well have put him over the top.
Vargas Llosa is well known as a prominent proponent of freedom and economic liberalization in Latin America. Why would he support Humala, who has approximately one degree of separation from Fidel Castro? According to Vargas Llosa, voting for Keiko Fujimori was “legitimating the worst dictatorship we’ve suffered during our history as a republic.” Vargas Llosa asserted that “electing Keiko Fujimori as president would be the worst mistake that Peruvians could make.”
But Peru quickly emerged from what Vargas Llosa calls Fujimori’s dictatorship. How long will it take for Cuba to overcome Humala’s friend Fidel Castro, or Venezuela to overcome Humala’s friend Hugo Chavez? It would have been nice of Vargas Llosa to consider the question.
Incidentally, in his column endorsing Humala Vargas Llosa forget to mention that Keiko Fujimor’s father, Alberto Fujimori, defeated him for the presidency in 1990. You’d think that he might have mentioned that in the interest of full disclosure.